1 History and context
From the mid-nineteenth century, Spain’s political elites wrestled with the following: how to achieve a form of political stabilisation after the turbulence of the country’s civil wars, how to achieve democratisation without losing control of the institutions of the state, and by century’s end, what were to be the most appropriate strategies to achieve the reversal of centuries of economic decline. The nineteenth century is often termed the century of nationalism, yet it was so only partially in the Spanish case. Spain’s project of national unity arrived late.1 Spain’s uneven economic development further fractured a project of Spanish unity as the social, cultural and economic trajectories of north and south diverged. Spain’s encounter with nationalism occurred on the periphery, in the Basque Country and Catalonia, and it was the delayed arrival of a Spanish national project that determined that Spain’s national question always meant nationalisms that defined themselves, at least partly, against Spain. Spain proved unable to successfully incorporate Basques and Catalans into the political nation. In fact, in one key period of the twentieth century, the opinion was held that only the destruction of these counter-nationalisms could build the Spanish political nation and ensure permanent loyalty to it. Post-Francoist attempts at building the political nation have never fully recovered from the original sin of Francoism: the attempted elimination of Spain’s distinctive linguistic and cultural heritage. However, the myth of a unitary national community in Catalonia, a united people or demos, should not allow us to ignore how various Spanish regimes, from democratic to dictatorial, have sought co-option and accommodation with both Catalan elites and major sectors within the population.
Nationalism and its consequences
The evolution of theoretical approaches to nationalism facilitates the encounter with Spain and its internal national diversity. Arguably Spanish political life has had one singular constant in the twentieth century: the unresolved dynamics of region, nation and state. As class and religious antagonism has subsided or weakened, Spain’s national question remains. Given its great import, theory on nationalism lagged behind the existence of the idea.2 Little was written on the subject until the early 1980s and in political science and other fields it was interpreted, together with religion, as social phenomena that were receding from view as societies modernised. As Nazi Germany was usually seen as the embodiment of nationalist excess, of what happens when a society places the nation above all other criterion for membership of a political community, post-World War Two nationalism tended to be equated with reactionary political phenomenon.3 Irish or Polish struggles against Great Powers were often viewed as revolts of reactionary Catholic peasants and little more. Much of the first wave of theoretical contributions saw nationalism as directly related to modernity, whilst class position was interpreted as the principal locus for political mobilisation and social conflict. However, the ever-greater scale of service economies and the decline of industry facilitated new engagement with the question of the nation. National consciousness has not faded in the same way as that of class. As class categories seemed subject to ever-greater fluidity, we see the emergence of new identifications and mobilisations around questions of identity. Social protest in the 1960s and 1970s was qualitatively distinctive and class-based movements were required to adapt and respond to the new axes that emerged. Here we can locate the new social movements, which came to include movements mobilising around issues of national identity. Nationalism shares with the new social movements the belief that society can be transformed, though diagnosis of the problem and the solution proposed are distinctive. New social movements and nationalists share what has been termed a ‘utopian tinge’: a sense that an endured frustration can be overcome.4 The emergence of nationalism as ideology and idea results in the politicisation of the national community.5 In this sense, ‘the emergence of the nation is a result of a set of social processes’.6 Nation-building is a political process involving two components: a discourse (an identity narrative) and a movement (the process of organisation).7 New approaches to nationalism emphasise ‘multiplicity and fragmentation, diversities and contingencies, uneven diffusions and incomplete projections’.8 As will later be seen, the Catalan sovereignty movement fuses politics, nationalism and much of the repertoire of the new social movements, giving it a distinctive expression.
The early wave of theoretical approaches to nationalism as a project of modernisation showed the limitations of these approaches in terms of their undervaluing of identity values. New approaches brought in the deeper roots of national affirmation framed around culture and historical memory. Others noted how nationalism is also a struggle for recognition and political representation, particularly in those territories that lack the apparatus of a state.9 Within typologies of nationalism, where language, culture and autonomous institutions are key, we can situate Catalanism for most of its existence as a defensive nationalism: it is above all defensive in terms of political project and approach to culture.10 With no national state to speak of and periodic phases of cultural and political repression, expressed in their most brutal form under the Franco regime (1939 to 1975), the Catalan national movement in the contemporary era has been defensive. The Catalan nation has a narrative of defeat and survival from various attempts at assimilation, in its most explicit form under the Franco regime. Catalan remained the dominant if not exclusive language in the majority of households in every social stratum of the region through the nineteenth century. Catalanism is a cultural nationalism and the language remains a key symbolic issue, as an important basis of identity. Modern and contemporary Catalonia has been formed as part of Spain, at times as an active participant, at others excluded from active state construction. As identities have rarely been binary but shared, Spaniards rarely functioned as enemies in the Catalan national narrative. Autonomists, republicans, nationalists, communists and others sought alliance with other sectors in Spain to transform the wider state in their interest. Catalan identity has mostly been constructed as a sub-category of Spain, and it is only in the contemporary period that we have seen the construction of a single Catalan identity that seeks to express notions of liberation from subordination.
The modern Spanish state order
With the emergence of the modern European state in the early modern period, we see a number of features appearing. The state is sovereign, or rather it assumes itself to be. In one sense, the pan-European political order that emerged post-Westphalia is founded on this assumption: within the boundaries of the state, the authorities are able to do as they please. The Westphalian agreement sought a solution to a European civil war and subsequently embedded the state within a bounded territorial reality. These states became ‘the premier and totalistic means of organizing political sovereignty’.11 The existing boundaries of the state can often hide important internal differentiation and the case of Spain is a prime example of this. In contrast to the centralised monarchy of Britain, with similarities in its multi-national dynamic, Spain’s trajectory from the early modern period was one of decline. Spain’s peak influence in European geopolitics was reached in the early seventeenth century and its role subsequently was to be a passive agent of the geopolitics of other European states. Whilst we enter the period of the Absolutist monarch, Spain’s version of this state formation is remarkably circumscribed. Even by the early nineteenth century, ‘the authority of the Absolutist State stopped at municipal level over vast areas of the country’.12 Territorial loss occurred in Spain with the independence of Portugal, the loss of the northern Catalan counties to France in 1659, of Gibraltar in 1713 and, for a period, the loss of the island of Minorca to Britain in the eighteenth century. This territorial contraction was compounded by the loss of Spain’s Latin American territories in the 1820s and its last remaining overseas colonies in 1898.
Spain emerged early as a great power yet its decline continued for hundreds of years after a century or so of glory. Spain was ‘neither absolutist in the classic sense of the term, nor was it centralizing or unifying’.13 Processes of homogenisation were effective in religious terms but less so in terms of the regional languages, which maintained substantial concentrated communities into the modern period. Spain’s delayed economic modernisation led to profound experiences of conflict. Whilst the French and British states successfully marginalised their national minorities, Spain’s distinctiveness was founded on the maintenance of regional difference. Geographic dispersion, inaccessibility and separate economic development all contributed to accentuating difference. Due to dynastic weakness, the kingdom of Aragon formed an alliance with the larger kingdom of Castile, a process that culminated in full fusion in the early eighteenth century. Castile, increasingly in the ascendant, became dominant in the territory that became known as Spain, and the kingdoms within the Aragonese federation declined in importance. Spain’s centre of gravity moved away from the Mediterranean. Spain’s decline from great power was conveyed during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Whilst the Basques supported the Bourbons, Catalonia identified with the Habsburg pretender to the Spanish throne. Spanish state centralisation can be traced to 1713 to 1714, yet whilst Catalonia and other kingdoms in Aragon lost their local rights and privileges (furs), the Basque Country preserved its administrative and legal distinctiveness until the 1870s.
The Spanish crisis and Catalonia
The defeat of 1714 led to the emergence in Catalonia of its national epic of resistance to Bourbon domination through the siege of Barcelona. Distinctive and selective historical memory is a key element within nationalist movements, just as its absence or amnesia is frequently located within the banal nationalism of the state. These selections were fundamental in the framing of the anniversary in both Barcelona and Madrid. The city’s fall would in time come to be adopted as Catalonia’s national day, the Diada. In December 2013, with the three hundredth anniversary of the defeat of 1714 on the horizon, a historian’s symposium symbolised how a society used historical myth and ‘usable pasts’ for commemoration.14 This event was mobilised by the pro-independence sectors of Catalan society, including its intellectuals, which increasingly delegitimised the autonomy obtained in the 1970s and called for the restoration of the ‘true’ sovereignty lost in 1714. Nations define themselves through selected historical experience. The year 1714 has canonical status in the Catalan national story through its telling as a war of national liberation, not a European conflict over the throne of Spain. Certainly, the end of the war in 1714 marked the punishment of Catalonia for being on the wrong side. Defeat was used by the Spanish authorities as an opportunity to emulate the centralised state model of the Sun King, Louis XIV.15 Catalonia lost her administrative autonomy, and was subordinated to the wider Spanish polity though the Catalan legal system remained intact until the late 1870s.16 Catalonia then was incorporated into the modern state structure of Spain.
Spain’s long nineteenth century from 1808 to 1939 was resolved by the construction of a state order determined to maintain internal control. As will be seen, Catalonia’s political elites were mobilised to address the problems of Spanish state failure and sought to lead state modernisation from the (northern) periphery. For most of its existence, Catalanism represented a bifurcation: a state project for Spain and a cultural project for Catalonia. In contrast to the Italian movement led from the north, Catalan leadership in Spain was not achieved. However, the second element to Catalanism, the cultural project, achieved substantial success and the Catalan question in the twenty-first century is inexplicable without this achievement. This can be usefully contrasted with the case of Spain, which could not find common agreement on notions of cultural or political nationhood. Spanish nationalism arrived after cultural Catalanism (partly developing as a response) and an ex-post facto narrative of Spanish nationhood was constructed to build the Spanish nation in the past. Spanish nationalism in time would thus become the national religion that offered regeneration through the glories of late medieval continental dominance. Following the ‘disaster’ of 1898, the priority became to construct the Spanish nation. The Spanish education system sought to emulate France by seeking to mirror the French nation-making process in the school.17 Yet the administrative weakness and poverty of the Spanish state failed ‘to convert instruction in national history into an effective instrument of political socialisation and national integration’.18 In spite of the profound influence of the French territorial and national model on Spanish elites, the Spanish state was unable to achieve the construction of w...
